The Action For India (AFI), International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-H), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-H) and T-Hub have joined hands to build social entrepreneurship ecosystem to help startups to scale up their reach.
The four entities have signed an agreement on Friday with a target to support over 5,000 startups in the next five years.
The agreement, signed at the annual Action For India Forum 2019 here on Friday, would pool up the experiences and resources to create an ecosystem to support tech-enabled, social impact startups. The partners will help the target group of startups to scale up their operations.
“India requires both venture model startups and social model startups to become a five trillion-dollar economy. The venture model startups have almost reached maturity. But social enterprises that improve quality of life of people by deploying technology need solid support and a robust growth ecosystem,” Ravi Narayan, Chief Executive Office of T-Hub, said.
T-Hub is collaborating with like-minded ecosystem enablers like IITH, IIITH and AFI to utilise their expertise and experiences to build a social impact ecosystem that will provide scaling support to social entrepreneurs, he said.
“The alliance will address the critical challenges that social entrepreneurs face. These challenges include working on their business models, discoveryof markets, building go-to-market strategies and scale-up strategies,” Sanjay Kadaveru, CEO of AFI, said.
AFI, a social impact-driven platform for entrepreneurs, will tap its network to help the startups that would be covered in the initiative. It will also take help from its AFI Impact Investment Fund and Silicon Valley Leadership Circle in this regard.
On their part, IIT-H and IIIT-H will also help the startups by providing technology upgradation and support using their government connections.